Many quick-service restaurants must prepare a high volume of food relatively quickly. These restaurants face a number of conflicting factors when striving to efficiently provide fast, palatable, and safe food. Customers expect to receive their food quickly and with predictable and constant high quality. Moreover, the rate of customer demand varies over time, with some periods, such as lunch and dinner times, having extremely high rates of customer demand. However, the kitchens of many quick-service restaurants are of limited size and/or production capacity and have a limited number of cooking devices.
To meet the often competing factors of quick service while producing a consistently high quality product, it is advantageous for one individual to cook a relatively substantial amount of food product in bulk and store the cooked food product in food trays while another individual food preparer transfers food from the trays to a sandwich bun or individual portion sized container to fill customer orders. Typical food products that are of most interest to have readily available for food preparers include sandwich fillings such as hamburger patties, chicken patties, breaded chicken patties, breaded fish fillets, Canadian bacon, pork sausage, and eggs, for example.
Because these prepared food products are not being served immediately upon preparation, it is critical to store the food product so as to maximize potential storage time while optimally maintaining the appearance, taste, temperature, and texture of the food product, as well as minimizing bacterial contamination of the stored food product.
In view of the foregoing, there exists a need for an improved food tray, tray insert, and a method of using the food tray and tray insert that provides longer storage times and optimizes, without significant adverse effects, the appearance, taste, temperature and texture of the pre-cooked food products, as well as minimizes bacterial contamination of such stored food products. Additionally, a need also exists for a food staging device that promotes efficient food handling and use of space within the kitchen of a quick-service restaurant.